1.Introduction33Corporeal real

Recognizing society as an emergent phenomenon does not, however,
marginalize the significance of the embodied subject in the body–society
relationship. Just because the body is a location for the pre-existing structural parts of society does not mean that embodied subjects can be reduced
to society or lose their capacities for creative action. As Andrew Sayer
(2000: 13) notes, ‘the interaction of the social with the physical’ still ‘needs
to be acknowledged’. This can be accomplished, in line with the realist
espousal of a stratified ontology, by insisting that the embodied subject, and
not just society, is an emergent phenomenon (Archer, 2000). Thus, in contrast to socio-biologists (who reduce individuals to the status of ‘survival
machines’ for genetic matter; Dawkins, 1976), or evolutionary psychologists
(who hold that our behaviour is ‘hard wired’ as a result of selective pressures
that impart the brain with a particular modular architecture adapted to the
needs of survival), corporeal realism also insists on viewing the embodied
subject as an emergent, causally consequent phenomenon and an important
objects of analysis in its own right.
5 It is important to elaborate briefly on the
basis on which this judgement is made.